Typescript diary of travels to East Asia. JONES, Mary Gwladys.

An otherwise untraced journal of an eventful five-month tour through Asia written by Mary Gwladys Jones (1880-1955), a lecturer in international law at Cambridge University. During her trip, Jones travelled to China and Japan and visited prominent academics, including Sophie ChenZen (1890-1976), a leader in the New Culture Movement and the first female professor at a Chinese university. Mary Gwladys Jones was concurrently director of studies in history and law at Girton College. She perhaps travelled in Asia under the auspices of Chatham House. Her journal begins at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Burma (Myanmar) on 13 January 1930, which she describes as "the most beautiful thing and in this soft light the most ethereal thing". After brief stops at Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, she departed for Hong Kong. She arrived in Hong Kong on 13 February, and remarks that the region has "the first 'grand scenery' I have encountered on this tour". In Shanghai on the Lunar New Year, she is "greeted by the noise of a thousand fireworks". A visit to the cabaret offers a chance to try "my first glass of vodka which resembles nothing so much as a rather inferior methylated spirits!" Jones visits Hangzhou on 25 February, where there "is no sun, and the sky is a silver grey it is very lovely and exactly like an old Chinese painting orembroidery." During a two-day stay in Nanjing, she has dinner with the economic historian Richard Tawney, the writer Jeannette Tawney, and several professors from National University, including Pearl S. Buck. On 4 March, Jones arrived in Beijing, where she spent the next month exploring the city and socializing with its academics. Throughout the following month, she dined several times with Sophie Chen Zen, and remarks on her kindness. Her dinner companions included Dr Hu Shih, the future Chinese ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942, and Ida C. Pruitt, a social worker who became a major force in the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Jones dedicates several diary entries to these dinners, especially the food: "Green tea with the leaves thickly standing at the bottom of the cup, hot rolls stuffed with meat and green stuff, immensely rich nut and chocolate buns". Jones struggles with chopsticks - "All Chinese meals though delicious are messy" - and is grateful to have the concession of a fork. On 14 March a party was thrown in her honour byMiss Taylor, a professor of English literature at the Fine Arts College, with Hu Shih, Sophie Chen Zen, Professor T. F.Chiang (a diplomat of the Republic of China), and others in attendance. Yenching University, Tsing Hua University, and Peking National University were among the academic facilities she visited. She also visited the Peking University Law School, where Professor Ming Chien Joshua Bau, head of the political science department, arranged for her to lecture. On 24 March, Jones lectured to a room "crammed with 250 to 300 students". "The professor introduced me as 'Professor Gwladys Jones of Cambridge' and I began to speak on the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague. At the end of each section, I stopped and he translated what I had said, and we did this turnabout stunt for an hour and a half, and it seemed to go very well indeed". After the lecture, she commented to Bau on the unexpected turnout, to be told that his students had advertised her lecture in local newspapers. Aside from frequent dinners, she enjoyed the theatre, where she saw Mei Lanfang perform, and exploring the streets. "In all these shops colour reigns supreme and all of them I find Bead Street and the bead shops the most fascinating". Jones left China for Korea and Japan on 3 April via the Manchurian Railway, less than six months before the Mukden Incident. Boarding the train, she noticed large number of soldiers, who she assumed were there to stop bandits but were actually extorting money on behalf of the conductor